Grade Your Press Release

HubSpot just announced the availability of PressRelease Grader. Based on the company’s Website Grader, the idea is to help companies optimize their releases for SEO purposes. I think PressRelease Grader will be a good tool for marketers and public relations professionals seeking to optimize releases for SEO purposes.

You just cut and paste the content of your release and it evaluates it on several points: general statistics, suggestions for content, and link analysis. There’s also a word cloud highlighting which words are used most in the release.

Things I like about the application:

– Education level of the release: Depending on the audience for the release, you have to write the release accordingly. Looks like my releases are graduate level. Thankfully I’m not a consumer facing company otherwise, this would be an issue.

– Gobbledygook Words: Based on David Meerman Scott’s book, this tells if you if you’re overusing certain words. Unfortunately scalable and robust are words that I constantly use in press releases!

– Link Analysis: This portion analyzes the words and links in your release. It provides recommendations to make the links stronger for SEO.

Recommendations for the release grade:

– Glossary of terms: I recommend hyperlinking industry terms and pointing to a glossary or definition. Though I’m not new to SEO per se, there are some terms that I may not use on a daily basis.

– URL to press release: I recognize that the tool is great for unpublished press releases. I would be interested in seeing an ability to put in an URL for a published release. This way, you can analyze additional points for the release, such as are the keywords, title and description consistent with the release.

I look forward to seeing how the Press Release Grader improves with feedback from fellow PR folks out there.

One basic tool a lot of PR folks don’t utilize enough is the Readability Stats in word, located under Spelling and Grammar. Obviously this doesn’t address specific 2.0 issues, but its very useful for id’ing long winded sentences, passive writing, reading ease and jargony acronyms.